Saying Goodbye to my Old Blog

I think the time has come for me to fully acknowledge that I can no longer fix my old blog that was located here or here: gerry.alanguilan.com

It's too bad because that blog has been in existence since February 2007. I did have a previous blog even before that which extends way back to 1997. I guess it's a consolation that the blog will still remain there, albeit in its erroneous state for the foreseeable future. I don't know exactly what went wrong. There was a big Wordpress update a couple of years ago, plus a server move by Yahoo (I think), which screwed up coding of my entries. Punctuations were introduced where other punctuations were before, screwing up html links and links to photos. That's why most of the photos don't appear. The files are still there, but the links are so screwed up that they don't link properly.

Later on while looking for old blog entries about Arlan, I realized that some blog entries had been cut short. Some paragraphs have disappeared off some entries. It's also entirely possible that whole blog entries might have been deleted. I know this because some pages have disappeared including my "About" page which listed my entire published work since 1990.

It's heartbreaking looking at the blog now so I don't really go there often anymore. It's not entirely hopeless though. I know for a fact that my entire blog is saved in pristine, complete condition at archive.org's Wayback Machine. So I guess if I want to see the complete version of my blog I can just look there. I can, of course, re-edit my old blog using data from archive.org, but I really don't trust Wordpress anymore. After fixing everything who's to say another update won't screw everything up again? I just can't invest that much time and effort on something sitting on such shaky ground.

I remember being on Blogger many many years ago and how easy it was to use. Now that Blogger is part of Google, I'm more relatively confident that my blog will be here for quite a while.